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Friday, October 7, 2011

Notes from a good conference in a tacky town

Can you tell the original one (which I can
see from my Paris home) from the fake one
which graced the view from my Mandalay
Bay hotel room?

LAS VEGAS

In my book High-Tech Planet I called a chapter “The tackiest
town on earth” because most of the action took place in Dubai. Now that I have been to Las Vegas I have to revise my judgment:
Sin City wins top honors (at least the runner up for the title has the Persian
Gulf as an exotic background.) Thankfully I was too busy inside the Mandalay
Bay Hotel complex with the 14th HR Technology Conference to wonder
about the meaning (if any) of creating a
surreal city in the middle of the desert
or, to make an easy pun, wander about either.

One of the most eagerly awaited
presentations was SAP’s debuting of
its SaaS offering, Career On-Demand, the German software company’s reply to the
smaller talent management vendors who have been eating its lunch in that market
segment for the past half decade (but not available until Apr. 2012.)
Although there was no doubt that
its user experience was an improvement on R/3 (in itself not an insurmountable
task), I felt underwhelmed by what I saw. Even the Fusion features which Oracle demoed at its booth looked
better. (By the way, anybody saw the many Vegas
cabs sporting “Oracle-#1 HCM” ads?) The
LinkedIn import function in the new SAP product is good (but then other talent
management vendors already offer it.) SAP is still playing catch up and it shows. On the last day, Merck explained in their presentation why they
decided on Lumesse’s ETWeb system for their 100,000- strong merged companies’ performance
management rather than SAP which they use as their HR system of record. Nothing I have seen so far is going to reverse the trend.

Speaking of Lumesse, on Day 1 of the conference, they announced their
acquisition of Edvantage, a Norway-based Learning vendor (acquisisition #11 this
year in my count.) This makes them the fifth talent management -TM) vendor to offer the full gamut
of TM functions, and so far the only European vendor to do so. Another European
vendor that attracted quite some attention was Meta4 which many people had already buried regarding the American
market, and who is staging a comeback, or at least attempt #2. Considering their strengths there are few vendors who
really deserve to succeed the second
time round in the land of the second chance.

Workday was again the vendor that attracted the most attention. Unsure,
though, whether that was due to the fun dance they performed in their booth. In
my two decades in the HR system business I
sure never thought that software updates
would make great lyrics nor make bodies gyrate to a catchy tune. (You can watch here the video.) Their announcement of an alliance with NorthgateArinso (NGA) on multi-country
payrolls was of more direct consequence to our business, though. Since many global
customers are hesitating whether to
replace their current HCM vendor with one that only covers two countries, and
all of them in North America, this alliance was only a question of time before it was announced. After
all, the only other possible suitors were Oracle or SAP, direct competitors to
Workday. NGA is a good compromise: its SAP-based offering (whether hosted,
on-premise or outsourced) offers more payroll localizations than any other vendor
and the only issue now is the extent to which either vendor offers a decent
out-of-the box connector to the other’s product (HR admin for Workday and the
various payrolls for NGA). Let’s watch
closely how their first joint customer AIG fares under this arrangement.

I was more than gratified by the 100-120 who attended my session on Expanding to Europe. Based on the number of HR executives who came to talk to me or contacted me afterwards, going global is increasingly becoming part and parcel of many HR projects.

No HR
Technology Conference is complete without the vendor-sponsored parties. In spite of my 9-hour jetlag, I managed
to drag myself to some of them on Monday night. I found the SilkRoad party quite
cool, and the Cornerstone one friendly and fun (and quite young –some of their
executives were not even born when some major products were launched.) I
passed on the late evening’s big bash since by then all life had deserted me, and I barely managed to crawl back to my room.

One last word on the location: in comparison with Chicago the facilities were better,
and the fact that we could stay on the premises was an advantage. On the down
side, the Mandalay Bay has all the charm of a crowded mall, with the most
dreadful hotel-elevator experience I have ever had (one day there was a long line
stretching back into the lobby.) And, of course, Chicago is an amazing place
with great architecture, culture and a true lake to breathe some fresh air. It
is also more easily reachable for most US-based attendees and even more so for
the many Europeans who came. After this interesting experiment in Sin City I definitely
vote for the conference to go back to the Windy City.

About the blogger

A global business and HR technology expert, I live in Paris,France where I was born, after stints in North Africa, the US (where I went to college), Spain (where I worked for the UN) and Brazil (my second home during my freelance years.) A strong believer in the dual role of HR and cloud technology to enhance corporate performance, these convictions are voiced in journal articles, at conferences and in blog posts. My hobbies include swimming, movies and literature. I am also the proud author of "High-Tech Planet", a rare business novel set in the IT industry (available from Amazon: http://amzn.to/czf0qw.) A relentless multilingual globe-trotter, you can see a sample of my detailed captioned pictures at http://bit.ly/dBcJkw. To quote Charlemagne: "to have a second language is to have a second soul." I also NEVER TAKE THINGS AT THEIR FACE VALUE. Challenge the received wisdom and go beyond first impressions: you'll be amply rewarded - that's my philosophy.
I can be reached at: contact@AhmedLimam.com.
NOTE: The thoughts expressed in this blog reflect my own, personal views not those of any of my employers, current or past.